a letter from a hundred years ago

While sifting through collage ephemera the other day, I came across this vintage envelope and letter.

What really struck me was the date.

Exactly one hundred years ago today*.

Improbable. Highly unlikely. Nearly impossible.

These sorts of occurrences happen often enough in my life that RocketMan might hear this and say something like…”Oh yes, quantum entanglement…” and off we go on a bewildering (to me) conversational tangent. Or is that a trajectory?

I’m posting the letter here today as a nod to the forces of impossibility, whatever they may be.

Maybe they’ll send everyone who reads this a bit of luck or joy or ease.

Because as artists and creative entrepreneurs, this is the stuff of daily existence.

Pulling off the impossible, the improbable, while managing scarce resources (time? money? energy, anyone?) and wrestling with the oscillations of doubt/certainty, fear/courage, clarity/confusion.

All at the same time.

Plus, I couldn’t help but imagine that:

one hundred years ago, I wasn’t here;

and a hundred years from now, I won’t be here either, and so…

what do I want to matter most today?

These practical and philosophical considerations distracted me for a good while during my search for whitish shades of collage ephemera, which I ended up not using anyway.

Also, I haven’t quite had the courage to tear up this letter for collage either. Not just yet.

I’m finally able to hunker down and design the printed collectors edition.

It’s my chance to design something vintage and old school, like an old manuscript would look like from the days before we had a computer on every desktop.

Once I get the typography finalized, then I’ll decide which images to include, and how to add those to the pages. I’m hand assembling and binding these, and customizing each one individually. So they are one-of-a-kind editions.

For those of you who ordered…some as early as June…thank you for your kind patience with my perfectionism love for, and attention to, detail.

Projects like this are a delight, as they are both digital and analog, and give me a chance to do design and production.

The production work is time-consuming, repetitive, and somewhat factory-like, which gives both sides of my brain a chance to relax in a way that is meditative. I like both aspects equally. One gives the other a rest.

Plus, I’m making a tangible product, which is delightfully tactile and satisfying.

Making something come to life from imagination to something I can hold in my hands, ship in the mail (via good old fashioned mail service), and share with someone else—someone who loves and appreciates handmade books as much as I do, is a dream come true.

You know, I always did want to work in publishing. So here we are.

Once I get these handmade editions into production, I’ll show you what they look like.

Who knows who might find this a hundred years from now? Hopefully someone doing a mixed media collage painting.

Speaking of…painting:

Yes! We will work/play together soon!

The last few weeks I’ve been getting requests for the Fall workshop schedule. Stay tuned, as there is goodness coming your way.

Like: a series of handholding adventures through The Creative Entrepreneur…have you always wanted to go through the book with a group? And get coached when you stall? Well, I’m going to be your Guidess! We’ll be playing with paint, of course.

If you can’t wait that long…Creative + Practice is available on demand. You could start that right now. No waiting!

If you don’t know what Creative + Practice is, it’s the exact creative process I use myself to be both creative and…entrepreneurial…which I share in the not-so-glamorous-as-you-might-expect *true* stories you’ll find in the memoir.

//

*Unless this was posted from somewhere other than the USA, where the month is put first, then the day, in which case this letter is really from December 13, 2013. So maybe I’ll update this post then, just in case. We need all the quantum entanglements we can get, right?

7 comments

Elsie Hickey WilsonAugust 14, 2013 - 9:27 am

I’ve had several experiences when I just got a strange feeling of is this on purpose or just random and yet it seemed to have chosen itself to happen. One in particular happened to me as I was on a genealogy trip and visited the Presbyterian Cemetery in Morristown NJ. While I did not find a gravestone for his grave as I was hoping to find, yet we know he was buried there. In consulting my notes about this ancestor, I realized that two hundred years ago from that day he had died. Yes, spooky and yet wonderful to share a moment from long ago.

This is so freaking cool ! It is like winning the lotto or something. I would keep the letter & envelope intact for the time being. Sort of a feng shui thing.Magic is afoot my friend !Thanks for sharing, frannie

Amazing coincidence, but perhaps somewhat less so when you consider that the stamp is Russian, which indicates that the date is most probably December 8th, not August 12th, since most of the rest of the world uses the day/month/year format for dates, rather than the US convention of month/day/year. Still cool, though, especially considering all it triggered in your own thinking. Cheers!

Hello from London, UK – I just had to write a little note esp. as I enjoy reading your blog posts as they are so inspirational and creative, they inspire me. Like Kim, I had an “Oh that’s strange!” moment last year, when I found a framed picture of a French fashion supplement in an antique centre in one of my most favourite places in the UK: Shrewsbury, Shropshire. I love historical fashion and it was only after looking at the clothes designs, I noticed the date of the publication, it was the same date as my birthday almost 60 years earlier, of course I had to have it and it now takes pride of place in my Craft Room. Thank you – Keep up the inspirational work! 🙂

I love finding items like this where the date or the place is the same as where you are right then. Thank you for sharing. I had an interesting “quantum entanglement” happen to me back in 1993. I was in Antarctica working for a year. We did not get a lot of current newspapers or magazines, so the old papers got left in a common room for other people to read. I remember picking up a newspaper from North Carolina that was printed on my birthday – December 29. I was reading the articles and one was about a man that I had been a nanny for his family five years earlier. He was not famous, but was quoted in the Bill Clinton campaign. The crazy thing was he is from Maryland, the paper was from North Carolina and I was at the bottom of the world. What are the chances of me reading that article?

Hola! I'm Lisa Sonora. ME: an American artist and author living in Mexico. YOU: Crave more creativity, more meaning, more adventures — and are tired of the same old stuff getting in your way. Creativity + Travel + Courage has been the theme of my blog since 2002, and sums up my life mission: to dare to make my life a creative adventure and to help women create more, stress less, and take meaningful, once-in-a-lifetime creative journeys. Welcome to my virtual studio. It’s messy in here.
But not as messy as my real studio. My real studio is located in Oaxaca, Mexico, and you’re invited to come visit and create.